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Summer Institute 2002

Overview

In its 14th year, OSC's Summer Institute (SI) 2002 was a success for all involved: student participants, returning student helpers, OSC and Advanced Computing Center for the Arts & Design (ACCAD) staff! Everyone who participated can take credit for the great outcome of SI2002 and its rewards.

Students gained an increase in computer science knowledge, new friendships, an enhanced ability to work on a team, a unique opportunity to use state-of-the-art supercomputers, and exposure to campus life. Students left SI2002 with a greater confidence in their individual learning abilities and their ability to adapt while working and living in a new environment with new friends of similar interests.

Projects

The students worked together in five teams on five diverse and challenging projects. Teams were comprised of a project leader (staff member who conceived and designed the project), students in the project group, and a student leader (in charge of dividing project tasks). For the first time, a teacher project group was formed. They completed their project just like the students.

The Mechanical Engineering project consisted of modeling the stress response of two All Terrain Vehicle (ATV) wheel hub designs. Honda, Inc. located in Marysville, Ohio, supplied both designs. The students took solid models of both designs (one a current production part and the second a candidate replacement design) and built a finite element model with the Altair Hyperworks software package. Simulated loads were applied to this finite element model and resultant stress calculated. Results were sent back to the Honda development staff for potential use. Connecting to the real world design problem gave the students valuable insight into how supercomputers are actually applied to daily engineering problems.Click here for the animation.

The Parallel Processing Project was designed mainly to teach the parallel processing language needed to split up a problem and assign different tasks to different processors. Their parallel code was run on supercomputers containing 128 and 256 separate processors. They simulated wave motion in 1, 2, and 3 dimensions.Click here for the animation.

The Computational Chemistry project focused on macromolecules. Using the fundamental principles of symmetry, computer models of large molecular systems were built. Students studying biomolecules obtained an initial representation from the Protein Data Bank and transformed this into a form suitable for molecular dynamics calculations. The early stages of these calculations indicated avenues of further refinements to the models. This a paradigm applied by many researchers in biochemistry. The final stages of the molecular dynamics calculations, which use the laws of physics to determine the motions of atoms in molecules, generated visualizations showing the trajectories of some proteins important to the life cycle of viruses.Click here for the animation.

A new project this year combined computer programming and pattern recognition. The students were taught the Neural Network algorithm where data structures within the program simulate the actions of human brain neurons. Students first wrote the neural network code, and then trained the program so that it would correctly recognize a set of shapes. Lastly, the students demonstrated that by using a neural network for pattern recognition, slightly distorted shapes could still be categorized correctly. For example, if one side of a pentagon were removed, the program would still say the image was a pentagon.Click here for animation 1.Click here for animation2.

With the Motion Capture and VRML project, students scripted a short story about the beginning of a baseball game and created a virtual world for their story. The environment involved a stadium and five characters. The story's keyframes were rigorously defined.

In the MOCAP lab, one team member wore a special suit, which had 41 reflecting balls attached at critical points of the body. This one actor performed all the motions for all the characters while specially designed cameras captured the action of the reflective balls. The position of the individual reflective balls was calculated and placed in virtual space.

Then the team learned the VRML programming environment and designed the stadium. Other programming tools were used to add the National Anthem, and the umpire's "Play Ball!" tune was downloaded from the Internet and included in the virtual world.Click here for the animation.

The teachers’ project, the Wave Motion project, concentrated on the study of acoustics. They recorded an electric guitar amplifier in a room at OSC. These recordings were then used as the input to a simulation of that room, using the two-dimensional wave equation as the governing equation. Comparisons were then made between the frequency response exhibited by the simulation and that actually observed in the room.Click here for the animation.

Students were required to do their own work from code implementation to final results. Excellent programming skills and an understanding of the project's science/engineering were prerequisites for facilitating code writing. Finally, the students made a video animation displaying their simulation data -- which was the ultimate goal of each project. Groups presented and explained their animations to parents, OSC staff, and guests who attended the SI Closing Ceremonies.